Dustin: 0:47

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nerdarator Dustin Howes. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here every Thursday at noon Pacific time. Put it on the calendar, stop by and hang out with me and a guest. My guest today, Amy Aitman, COO over at Ventureforth Media. Welcome to the Nerdatorium, Amy.

Amy: 1:08

Oh, thanks for having me. I'm so excited. This is going to be fun.

Dustin: 1:12

Oh, great. You and I go way back all the way to affiliate summit, 2025 last month. And had a meeting with you. I've, I've got my client. Rolodex. And you and I've met in the past, but never even made that connection. And then we sat down together for half an hour and had a great conversation. And you've got this great energy about you and warm and somebody that I want to work with, which is very pleasant to have in this industry. So glad you jumped in to jump on with the Nerdatorian today.

Amy: 1:46

Oh, I'm so excited to be here. And Affiliate Summit West was such a fun event. It was like, Vegas and everybody came with great energy to work and do things and to get a pulse on what's happening in the affiliate space was so much fun for me and yeah, it was great. So it was great meeting you too.

Dustin: 2:04

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. I did add affiliate summit. Did you go to many sessions? I know you're speaking, but did you go to many sessions or were you focused on a relationship building and meetings?

Amy: 2:16

I was focused mostly on relationship building, but I did go to a couple sessions. I have all the recordings, so I will watch a few as well, but yeah, it was Like packed days, packed for sure. People come to, meet and connect. So that was really fun surprise there.

Dustin: 2:35

That's how it's supposed to be done. All right, Amy tell us about who you are.

Amy: 2:40

Okay. I am, I do a lot right now. Like you said, my title is COO of Ventureforth Media. I've been working with you in and. Publications for, this is like my 10th year working with on this before that. I, I've had my own media company. I've had some, my own agency, content marketing agency. I started off as a freelance writer. I like to say I started off working online and freelancing because nobody would hire me. It feels like a long time ago now, but I, still remember. Finishing up my university degree and it was, 2008 is when I graduated. So if you know anything about the state of the economy in 2008, similar to what we're going through right now for a lot of people and it was just nobody. I literally couldn't get a job. I went into my old. Place where I waitressed for six years and they wouldn't hire me. And I was at like, low point. I was like, what am I going to do with my life? And my husband was actually the one that said, just get one person to pay you to do something, some kind of writing, some kind of editing, something. And that's how I started. And then a few years later, I met you and I started a mom blog when I had my son. And once you start making money online, it becomes really addictive and it becomes really fun and built a great community of a lot of friends in the industry now, and it's been really great journey for sure. Amazing.

Dustin: 4:09

I had something similar. I graduated in 2008 but I immediately moved to Vegas and played poker for a living for a year. And then I went dead broke and I was in that space of all right, I need to get a job where am I going to go? And I couldn't even get a job as a poker dealer anymore because the economy was such a bad place. And it took me a long time of grinding out. Bad paychecks until I got my first job at CJ in the affiliate industry. And it sounds like we had a kind of a similar episode with the industry, but here we are 15 years later in the space and thriving. So that's a great backstory. Tell us about VentureForward Media, what you guys do and who you're serving out there.

Amy: 4:57

Okay. We're publishers. We built. over 150 websites from scratch. I'd say our specialty for a long time was building sites brand new. A lot of times we went into niches that we didn't see there was any, great publications. Or we went, nichier. We went more, instead of just doing like a home improvement site, we tried to, do something like porches, or, we try, that was really what we did. We started building sites in trenches and we got some investor funding to build a few, to build some sites. We did a group of 26 websites at one point, 32 websites. And so my part, my role is the operations, the editorial side of, It, getting hired, like hiring the content teams, hiring all the writers, building out the our content management systems everything from, yeah, editorial, I can't, editorial has been such a wild journey.

Dustin: 5:55

Okay. In the

Amy: 5:55

last few years, because, the quality that you need to stand out has really shifted, the goalposts has really changed. And so for our editorial teams, having, to push them to do better quality that was really, that was a big part of, what I've done. So that's, we're foremost publishers. We've, we create, we publish content. I like to say we. have the best writing editorial teams out there. Our writers are real people, they're real nerds. It's a huge joy for me finding someone that nerds out about something that I know nothing about and, you ask them about it and they take that deep breath and they're like, you get the nerdiest things. I love that none of our, all of our writers are we have a lot of people that are freelancing contracts, so we get to hire we have people that are like, in HR right now or project or in project management, they do that job during the day and at night, weekends, whenever we can get them to help us out, they, they work with us or we had a lot of like video game sites and they literally, these gaming writers literally would play games for, a weekend straight when a new game came out, 36, 40 hours, you Just to write a review and, some guides. So

Dustin: 7:10

I feel like,

Amy: 7:12

yeah, dedication sometime. I just, I'm amazed at how what our writers have done and how they've, I don't know, shared their life with us. We have a wedding, a love you tomorrow site, a wedding site. And it's our, the pictures are all from our writers. on the site, their wedding. They've shared their wedding photos and

Dustin: 7:31

yeah, that's organic. And unfortunately, like you guys got hit just as hard as anybody on the. Google apocalypse over the last year. I don't know what you call it in your terms. I

Amy: 7:47

depends on the day. It depends on the day. Obviously for years we've been publishing and dealing with Google updates and when you have a portfolio, I'd say. We have about, at any given time, about, 80, 90 websites that we care about. And sometimes half of them, or sometimes 10 of them go down and then 10 of them go up. So we've always been able to shift our resources to the sites that are doing well. And it was working, it worked well for a long time. And the new, and we would learn from things. So our new every time we did another portfolio or create another site, we'd see success. So this is before we're talking pre helpful content update, the Google apocalypse as publishers say, can talk, can call it I, I almost don't even want to call it the helpful content update, but that's yeah, like we. We rode with the, we rode the Google rollercoaster. We, it was fine. We would go, we would build on sites that were doing well and we would let sites that weren't doing well sit, or we would, we'd optimize and do all those things. But I think, yeah, the helpful content update, and I'm sure many people in your audience know what I'm talking about, was a huge shift, and I remember when it happened I actually was in Vegas at a digital entrepreneur event, and Got to sit down with you in which we've been working together for 10 years and we've only been in person hung out in person twice. So this is so hd you have been Hanging with you and talking with my other fellow publishers. We're we have our laptops We're all looking at the at our, google analytics and like what is going on here. It felt different really quickly and my first instinct was just to wait. The first month it was, we saw it felt different, but also, things can change really quickly. Sometimes Google, we'll do something and then your site will start to go up. So we didn't panic. I didn't, the first month I didn't, I'd say a month or two, we kept publishing, we kept doing what we do and try not to panic, but it didn't take long for us to realize this was something publisher wide. A lot of people that had, content websites were feeling, you're feeling it wasn't. And the content sites that like, that I used as like these, like great examples of, EAT. So like experience authenticity, people trust them brands that content sites that I would know by brands were getting hit. Yeah, it was pretty painful.

Dustin: 10:17

Luckily he had a portfolio so big and it sounds like you've got a well oiled machine to be able to consi Excuse me. To be consistently updating content and creating new ones for that many sites. And I'm sure sites come and go and you guys have a good flow. Video games seem to be really consistent, especially through the pandemic era. Those probably really thrived. We just got a client over at inflection backbone. com which I need to talk to you about it. It was agenda, but I forgot you were in that video game section anyway. With those niches, like I assume some come and go. Like sites on like masks, for example, would probably you probably spun up a site about masks or remote working that were thriving for a couple of years and then just tanked all of a sudden because the traffic volume was gone away, right? Oh, yeah.

Amy: 11:12

I would say the two interesting examples I have for the COVID was great for our business. I was never. We have never busier. It was fun. We built a site, we built a whiskey site and we built a wine site. And I think you could see how COVID was, the alcoholic choices were changing during COVID. So like our wine site was doing really well and growing. And then all of a sudden the whiskey site started to do really well, like after a few months into COVID and those sites. Just naturally had, a little had a dip after COVID because people just changed and, that is, that's natural to, yeah, to publishing. We expect all those kind of, changes and updates and I maybe I was really optimistic during COVID that our online shopping habits would stay online because I personally love Buy my products online.

Dustin: 12:04

Yeah,

Amy: 12:04

I personally hate going to the mall. I hate shopping in real life if I could get every single thing delivered to my house I probably would and I thought everybody else would feel the same way. But as we've seen people It didn't stay. It didn't stay,

Dustin: 12:18

which is weird to me too, because I buy 95 percent of my things online. The only thing is I don't do is shoes and pants, essentially everything else. I don't need to try on and I can just ship it back. It's too easy and too convenient to be shopping online. Speaking of like changes Everybody's strategy has to change every time Google does an update. What are those things that you guys have been doing that are working right now in 2025?

Amy: 12:45

So we've, after the helpful content update, it was like a dark day. I had to lay off. entire writing teams, like hundreds of people, I were not publishing. We're not, we did a wait and see approach where I know like some of my publisher friends made a lot of updates, just kept publishing. We were like, okay, let's get our operational cost, at a minimum, because we don't know how to approach this. And we had to like, We had to take a step back and try to figure out, what was next. On my end, I looked into a lot of email marketing, this building, it's really hard to build a list when you don't have traffic. That was really tough for many years. We've done Pinterest as a traffic driver and we still get. traffic from Pinterest that we built years and years ago. So all of my publisher friends were in the space of like, how are we, what's the traffic garbage? Like we need to get traffic. And if it's not coming from Google, where is it coming from? And so one of the things we dug into was Reddit because we're seeing now, and still now the growth of Reddit how many forums and how much UGC is in the SERPs these days. But, How do you even get into Reddit? Like, how do you even start to engage in Reddit or use Reddit as a trafficker or retosh? So that was one area that we really dug into and it's been really fun. It's been challenging, but it's really helped. We get traffic from Reddits from Reddit all the time because it's just so prevalent in search. So that was one area that we really decided to focus on so much. So we started a serve, a service, a business. We're helping brands with the right strategies and it's really fun. We're also like help figuring out things for brands, figuring out new ways to build better subreddits, new ways to engage everything read it and. We're, it's like we have, I feel like we have no choice. We have to learn this,

Dustin: 14:45

but

Amy: 14:45

in that journey with the Serbs too, we've also seen the rise of video again, a video is really dominant in the Serbs. So we're doing a lot of video publishing now, which is. It's really fun and really great. It's also a traffic arbitrage. I know that the traffic's coming to our YouTube channels, but we can send them back to the sites. There's a lot of ways to monetize YouTube channels. So that's been really fun. We're also looking at things like, Quora is another, it's still, it's not, depending on the searches, depending on the niche, I see Quora a lot. I see other forums. I see like I said, YouTube and things like Medium. So distribution is really important and we've really Thought about that and how that works for our sites and created yeah, a lot of distribution channels. And our focus really isn't on just Google either, like we are killing it on Bing for some of our sites. So if that is the case, the traffic can be really worth it just from Bing, just from ChachiBT search, we're starting to see those show up, that show up in our Google Analytics, which is really exciting. So Google is losing market share. And even in Google and what's happening, it's so divided. There's still lots of opportunity, but how do you get, how do you get, take advantage of those opportunities is, what we had to figure out.

Dustin: 16:10

Yeah. He brought up some really good points that super smart strategy to be back linking from things like Quora and Medium. to your sites. There's plenty of sites out there that are free, user generated content that you can naturally put in back links to your sites and your articles. Super smart in that essence. And when you're working with the clients that you're working with, it sounds like You're paying a lot of money up front for to generate that content. And maybe you're just doing some kind of upfront fee to, or hybrid model. How do you really work with the clients that you're working with?

Amy: 16:49

Oh, it depends on the client goals, like for a Reddit strategy, if it's a brand reputation or brand management strategy, which is really important in Reddit, because now brands are recognizing like. A bad review on Reddit is surfacing to the top of Google now. So something that's maybe posted eight years ago, 10 years ago is now hurting their brands, which, two years ago, that wasn't the case. It was, all third party publications. And all of these discussions, the Reddit, the YouTube all of anything that's published is that's, what's informing AI overview. So if you look up your brand all of a sudden, and. It's there's three bad reviews on Reddit. That's what's coming in the overview. So it's really hurting brands either, even if it's not true. So we do some of that. If we work with a brands on that, we'll, we'll go in and we'll, start, we'll create conversations or add to conversations in Reddit so that it helps, and that's really fun. To do that,

Dustin: 17:48

almost like. Reputation management. Yeah, and

Amy: 17:51

those are fun. Those are always fun to do. On our publishing side. We still do brand partnerships where we work with brands that, we, that we love and we trust and that have great product. We have our real writers testing the products and editorial. And this is maybe because I'm a content person. Our editorial side is. Not the same as our monetization side. So our writers sometimes don't even they don't even know that this is a brand necessarily that we're working with. They are authentic. They test they tell it like it is on our publications, which is really great. It's great for brands to have that. So we work, we do that. And yeah, we charge, a flat fee to publish. And for all the publishers out there, I really want to encourage you, whether you, whether your sites are the top ranking sites in Google. If they're, if it's great content, if they're real, writers, and these are publications, it's still valuable for these brands to get published on your site, whether they're ranking in Google or not.

Dustin: 18:55

And

Amy: 18:55

that might surprise a lot of publishers and maybe a lot of brands, but our sites are informing, AI overviews. And like I said, some of our sites are doing amazing on Bing and not even in the top two pages of Google.

Dustin: 19:11

Okay.

Amy: 19:11

So the search landscape, it's diversifying. It's changing. And so I think brands that recognize that have to get in more than one type of partnership. So we do work with brands and I like to say our writers, I think our writers are amazing. I think they, they test. The products in their real homes, they give real opinions. They're really authentic. Like I said, they share their lives. Some of them, we've, worked with a lot of brands and they, and I think that's, that is amazing. I think the real conversation, I think what Google wants to surface is that user generated content. Those real people opinions. If you think about it, it's completely anti AI. The things that our writers do. And I can't do a, I can't test a product and tell you how it feels. It can tell you what other people have done. Other people have said, I'm done about the product, but it really can't do all the little things. And so I don't think it can yet.

Dustin: 20:09

You can't feel with the digestion of the supplements that you're taking in. Okay.

Amy: 20:15

Or tell you the smell or the taste or. And I think that's why video is doing so well as well, because I think people want to see, real people doing real things and. Especially for the queries those high commercial intent queries, like the comparisons, the reviews, those kinds of things.

Dustin: 20:33

Yeah. And you bring up a great point there. The video is on the uprise in the industry altogether. And how are you guys coupling that with the brands that you're working with along with the content? Is it like an absolute must with every piece of content that you guys create?

Amy: 20:51

In a perfect world, a brand comes to us and I, we create content on We create videos to go along with the review and a comparison and the best of and maybe an instructional video and to, to put on our YouTube channels and we do Reddit marketing for them and we do some Quora and we do some Medium wherever we see opportunities in the SERPs because there are so many ways to get into the SERPs now that are, I think in a perfect world, I want to be, I want to get them in all of it. I want to work on All of it. So yeah, video is really important. I think video, I think it's almost surprising me these days, how easy this to rank for videos again, and seeing even going back to videos that we did two or three years ago and searching, we work with this brand how's that video doing? Oh, it's still ranking both videos on both channels are still ranking at the top. And that's. Really fun. It feels like in some ways, old school SEO days when everything we created would be ranking.

Dustin: 22:58

And speaking of ranking if you are a brand out there that is looking for publications at our ranking online, one tool you can use is. Dash go check out. You can find hundreds of niche partners that are ranking for keywords that you're looking for using our tool in just five minutes. So get started, go to dustinhowes.com/affistash and sign up today. And that's great. I think that's a

Amy: 23:26

great tool. And I think brands need to, think like that and work with our fellow publishers.

Dustin: 23:31

Yes. Agree. Download the Amazon anyway cool tool call out time. Oh, what are you using right now that is, that you're finding super effective in your world?

Amy: 23:44

I would say, this is going to sound so obvious to so many people, but I still, I'm really enjoying. chat GPT. I am as an operational nerd, I am a brain dump person. And I feel like that's one of my skill sets in life is that I can think things through and I brain dump and I used to have to take my brain dumps. and organize it into, something workable. That time it saves me. I can, tell you, I can create a spreadsheet easier. I can operationally, Chattopadhyay is my Jam

Dustin: 24:19

these great call out. I'm using it every day for ideation purposes and like sometimes filler content for outlines of and then I get my ideas out for the content that I'm creating. And I really love the the query. Somebody told me. AI coach Jonathan green. He told me let's ask them what you need to ask them to get the answers that you need. And that was, I

Amy: 24:46

love that. I love that. Yeah. For straight up content creation. I don't think AI cuts it. I don't think, I would never publish something that was. That was AI generated. One, there's no moat. If I can do it in five minutes, everybody can do it in five minutes. There's no, it's no value. Not bringing anything to the table, but for operational, for operations. Yeah. And it is fun to see what else. And I also ask it what I'm going to make for dinner.

Dustin: 25:11

I usually

Amy: 25:12

go find the recipe on a recipe site, but for brainstorming what do I want to eat tonight? Yeah.

Dustin: 25:18

That's smart. I've never used it in that capacity. That's funny. All right, what about

Amy: 25:23

my fridge? And then what can we make?

Dustin: 25:25

That's good. What about tools that you want to see built in this industry? What are we missing? And what if you may wave that magic wand what tool would you build right now?

Amy: 25:36

Oh, okay. This is a really tough one because when we were publishing like at one point, 1200 articles a month, we built our own, content management system because there, there was so many things we wanted to do. We wanted to publish and, have a core hub. We wanted to publish on many sites. We wanted to keep our payments all in there. And so like that tool at that time, I didn't see anything, and now since then I've seen there's some really great headless SEO options. There's a lot of things like that. I would say. These days the flexibility of tools is really important to me because workflows change so much so for our workflows, we're using air table just because I can change a workflow in a dime We want to start publishing on medium and we want to have a we want to have a medium workflow. I can do that So a tool that Would do would do that. And some I think the distribution of content is something that I'm really fascinated by and looking into some tools for that. So if people are thinking about that that's that would be really interesting to, I know there are some out there, but I feel like the customization and changing the workflows. On a dime is really important, of course, doing narrative too. So

Dustin: 26:52

now that you say that I think it would be super helpful to build one piece of content, a 2000, 3000 word article with a video and then say, Hey, go make this into a LinkedIn post. A medium post a quora question that you can answer and all these other things like instantly if you can just reword what we've already created here, that would be super helpful. I would buy that tool

Amy: 27:19

with brand like with the brand voice and with the brand tone and with data behind it as well. It would be really interesting to I know there's tools that kind of do that and I've tested out a few like social media, AI tools also like video tools video because I really would love to get to where I'm in our writers do the video and they do some of their own editing, but something that makes it easier to pull in, video and doesn't feel like AI. I, it's you want the ease of AI stuff, but you don't want it to be here. Like it's been AI and you don't want it to be. I don't want to publish a bunch of AI video, so something that helps make it easier for our authentic creators to edit and publish. Videos in a way that's not doesn't feel like AI that would be really interesting too. That's like a really simple user tool.

Dustin: 28:11

Good call. Yeah. I love what Descript's doing. And that's what I use for my editing. It's affordable at 35 a month for a small creator like myself. And it is making leaps and bounds in this industry on like workflow, help flows helpful workflow.

Amy: 28:30

No, I'm looking into that. I'm looking into that tool for sure. Yeah. And a few more too.

Dustin: 28:35

Lastly optimizing your talents. Like you've come through this industry as a publisher. What can you help any advice you can give folks out there that might be trying to figure out their path on you were a content writer, you figured it out and you went down this path. What do you suggest for people that are writers like. Getting into this arena.

Amy: 28:58

Oh, this is such a fun question because I really love the idea of being in your zone of genius. And I talk about that with my team. And for years I've got to build a team where. It was a choose your own adventure. It is still is because if somebody really, if they're really creative and they really are a great editor and they want to edit, I've got editing work. If they're really great on video, if they're really funny and entertaining and they want to do, I've got video work. I've got, and I feel like being in your zone of genius is. Such a privilege. It's amazing. And that's, I really do believe that. And, this summer I took I did a side gig where I was literally a project, technical project manager, which is fun. It was a fun thing to work with. It was Very different for me and I realized quickly that I was not in my zone of genius and not because I wasn't good at it. So I think people when you're in this industry sometimes we think if we're good at something that's our zone of genius and I think it goes way beyond being good at it. I'm a very good project manager. I can, I still manage projects all the time. But for me being able to be creative, work with creatives that's really what lights me up and gets me excited to come in, to the office. And, to be frank, it's that's what keeps me, I work weekends, I work nights, and I don't feel like that's a drudgery because it is. I feel it's really fun. It's really great to see people, to meet other nerds, to work with creatives. And so that's where I think living in your zone of genius really matters. And so for anyone out there and if you're a writer, you can do so many things. If you're a writer, you're a thinker. Writing is thinking. To this day, if I want to think through something, I start writing about it because it helps you process, it helps you think through something. And so if you can think and you can write and you can communicate, there's so many avenues that you can do in our industry. And I'm seeing a lot of opportunities right now for people. I know the freelance world's been hit. I know our publishing world's been hit. I know it's been a really tough time, but I've hired a lot of people back this year. I'm still looking for people. I'm still looking for great talent. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunities to

Dustin: 31:13

great tips. Love it. Lastly, how do we connect with you, Amy?

Amy: 31:17

Oh, I'm online. I'm on LinkedIn. You can connect with me there. If you want to check out our Reddit marketing it's redvisible. com. And yeah, and we have, I'm pretty accessible on LinkedIn. So you reach out to me anytime. I'm happy to have a chat, happy to talk to other people in this industry as well. I have a deep. Love for this world, for publishing, for the affiliate space. It's given me a livelihood. I really am so thrilled to be here. So if anyone's, wants to chat just, hit me up on LinkedIn. More than that. She's not

Dustin: 31:53

lying. She's a chatter and she, you're such a great nerd. Thanks for being such a great

Amy: 32:00

guest.

Dustin: 32:00

so much. So

Amy: 32:02

much fun.

Dustin: 32:04

Appreciate you joining me. And for those folks listening, keep on recruiting and we'll see you next time. Take care.